Evelyn Dunbar: October 2012

Wednesday, 24 October 2012

Christmas, 1942

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1942 Pre-publication presentation (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

Evelyn married Roger Folley in August 1942, and the following Christmas they started what became a tradition over the next 17 years: Christmas greetings designed by Evelyn, with text written (or selected) by Roger. The 1942 card above is the only one of the series without a text from Roger. It will enlarge if you left-click on it.

In 1955 Evelyn had the notion of assembling all their previous Christmas cards into an album, possibly with a view to publication. This entailed cutting each card in half, mounting each half on card and adding a brief comment. The printer's name (in this case Mackay's of Rochester) is given, I imagine, to help an eventual publisher to locate the original blocks.

There's nothing traditionally Christmassy about any of them. Their individuality and the denseness of Roger's texts, which will become apparent as the series unfolds, became notorious in the family for their un-Christmassy-ness. Evelyn's Christian Science, however - with which Roger complied to some extent - did not celebrate Christmas as a religious festival. Evelyn's comment, in her own handwriting, reads:

Our first Christmas card. At that time R. was in the R.A.F. and E. an official war artist, so the symbolism is obvious. The distant peaks, one imagines, are meant to suggest the brief "leave" periods in the Lakes or the Yorkshire fells.

Evelyn's and Roger's short war-time honeymoon was spent in the Yorkshire fells. This, and the star Evelyn has placed on the 'distant peaks' in her cameo, might serve as the last word on the disquisition in the previous post (Baling Hay, 1943) about the infrequency of mountains in Evelyn's work. The sharp-eyed will note that, exceptionally, Evelyn has signed herself 'E.F.' (Evelyn Folley), instead of her usual 'ED', 'E.Dunbar' or 'Evelyn Dunbar'.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING by Christopher Campbell-Howes
is available to order online from
http://www.casematepublishing.co.uk/index.php/evelyn-dunbar-10523.html
448 pages, 300 illustrations. £25

Friday, 19 October 2012

Baling Hay (1943)

Evelyn Dunbar Baling Hay 1943 (1' 6" x 2': 45.8 x 61cm) National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

Baling Hay is the third, and maybe the most remarkable, of the three Women's Land Army paintings which had their genesis in Evelyn's stay at the Institute of Agriculture, Usk (now Coleg Gwent) in January, 1943. It's such a bold, confident and compelling composition that I find myself wishing Evelyn had executed it on a larger canvas than on the modest 18" x 24" she gave it.

The baling machine previously seen in Threshing and Baling, Monmouthshire (the subject of the previous post) has been moved to the haystacks of another farm in the area. Or maybe it's another part of the same farm. I don't know where it is, but readers who know Monmouthshire may recognise the location. Tarpaulins will have been removed from the stacks of hay mown the previous May or June, and the Land Girls, who may form part of a team assigned to the baling machine contractor, are pitchforking what some used to call 'birds' nests' of hay into a hopper, in which the hay is compressed.

A guillotine, suspended above the hopper, drops down to slice the compressed hay into the required length; a belt-driven rack - you can see the drive-belt on the extreme right - inches the bales forwards to where two Land Girls seated either side of the rack are ready to tie the familiar rectangular bales with prepared wires, using pliers to twist the wire securely and to remove excess. The Land Girl in the right foreground, clad in winter greatcoat (with the WLA shoulder title, a red crown on a green background) is bringing forward a bundle of pre-looped wires, and judging from the amount of hay to be baled they will all have been used by the day's end. One of the very few figures in the entire canon of Evelyn's work to be shown looking out of the frame, she is looking up at the sky, perhaps wondering when the rain will start again.

Hay - and straw - bales tied with wire may be familiar to older readers. I remember as a youth occasionally manhandling such bales, loud with complaint about the wires cutting into my fingers. Wire ties have long since been replaced by automatically-tied baler twine, or by plastic netting enveloping much larger drum bales. Baling machines like the one Evelyn has meticulously painted are only found in farming museums. Although this can't have been her intention at the time, Baling Hay has become a historical document, a valuable record of past agricultural practices.

Evelyn claimed that during her extraordinarily rain-sodden stay of several weeks at Usk that January, there were only three fine days. (Indeed, the word 'Usk' is a Celtic word for water.) Baling Hay must show one of them. It will have been important to ensure that the hay stayed dry: wet hay will become mouldy and unfit for animal feed the next winter. Once again we have the Dunbar message of promise and confidence in the future.

There are certain clues as to how the various tasks are divided up to make the most of a fine day. Speed is essential. There are nice contrasts between the disparity of uniform and different layers of clothing. It's cold: the Land Girl in the centre foreground, who has commandeered a bale to sit on, has a full, if unorthodox, uniform of boots, overalls, whipcord or corduroy breeches, plus a non-uniform plaid lumberman's jacket or fleece and a sack to cover her lap and knees. Maybe she's also wearing the familiar WLA green jersey underneath. She's sitting on another sack. She finds she can work more deftly without gloves, and you can imagine her having to warm her hands every now and then, maybe by placing them inside her jacket. For the Land Girls on the haystacks, however, the work is so physical and warm that they've stripped down to their breeches and green jerseys. The one in the centre, feeding the hopper, has even got her sleeves rolled up. As always, Evelyn is observing very accurately.

The Land Girl on the right of the bale rack is curiously under-dressed compared with her opposite number: she has probably just come off haystack duty in a muck sweat, grateful to be able to hand over her pitchfork to the previous occupant of her bale-seat, sit down and do a bit of wiring until the next change-round. In a few minutes will she too be looking for extra layers to put on? She has already pulled up the shoulder-straps of her overalls.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)

Further reading...

Sunday, 14 October 2012

Threshing and Baling, Monmouthshire (1943)

Evelyn Dunbar Threshing and Baling, Monmouthshire 1943 (1' 4" x 1'8": 40.8 x 51cm) National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

This is the second of the three Women's Land Army paintings initiated by Evelyn during a particularly cold and rain-sodden January, 1943. She spent several weeks at the Institute of Agriculture at Usk (now Coleg Gwent), in Monmouthshire, housed in a WLA caravan. Despite the comparative nearness of her husband, Roger Folley, then undergoing navigation training at RAF Colerne, it's not hard to imagine her relief at abandoning her caravan with its cussedly nonconformist paraffin stove, and making for the comfort of her studio in Rochester to work up her sketches, probably far greater in number than eventually appeared as finished paintings.

Maybe this scene features one of the few fine days in that very wet January. There's an east wind blowing (the right-hand barn door is jammed open with a plank to prevent the wind catching it), not usually a rain-bearing wind in South Wales. We can orientate the scene by the shadow of the hay-rake, propped correctly with tines uppermost, cast against the left-hand wall by a pale sun, low in the post-midwinter sky.

The barn is old, built of local sandstone and roofed with Welsh slates, patched with mosses and lichens. An unusual feature, although not uncommon in the area, is the vertical ventilation slits on either side of the doors, maybe an indication that the barn was originally built to overwinter cattle in. At any rate the previous summer's wheat harvest has been stored here in the dry, and the time has arrived for a threshing machine, of the same travelling contractor's type that we saw in Evelyn's Threshing, Kent (1941), to be installed in the through passage of the barn. Connected to it is the baling machine, packing the straw into rectangular bales which will be stacked for use mainly as cattle litter and thereafter as manure. The noise must be indescribable, the chaff and dust everywhere, and the scarved and maybe masked Land Girls inside, stripped of their heavy coats, must be as grateful for a through-draught as those outside are grumbling about the sharp edge of the wind.

The design of Threshing and Baling, Monmouthshire is strong, assured and confident, as almost always with Evelyn's work, and I think much may be read into certain features of it. I wouldn't like to suggest that a detailed history of World War 2 can be extrapolated from her War Artists' Advisory Committee commissions, but a glance through the major headlines of January 1943 includes:

Germans Surrender in Stalingrad
Conference of Allied Powers in Casablanca
Berlin Hit by First Daytime Bombing
Allies Take Tripoli as Germans Retreat

(I've taken these from Chronicle of the 20th Century, ed. Derrik Mercer, Longmans, London 1988)

Slowly, gradually, the outlook is becoming more positive. (But then Evelyn's outlook is never negative.) There's room for hope. The tide of war is turning the Allies' way, and the age-old principles for which Britain stands are being vindicated. I expect it's much too fanciful to imagine this barn as a metaphor for Britain, as This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, as Shakespeare makes John of Gaunt say about England in Richard II, but do the ventilation slits remind us of arrow slits in mediaeval military architecture? And it may be equally illusory to note that the barn itself is built of Devonian or Silurian sandstone, among the oldest rocks not just in Wales but in the entire planet, and do these roots to a remote past suggest the time-tested durability of the ideals for which this war is being fought?

(As I re-read this I'm a little ashamed of the sentimentality of this analysis, something that later Marxist and postmodernist historians and critics would give me maybe 2 out of 10 for, if that: but then I remember that the historian Sir Arthur Bryant, with similar flights of often utopian-agrarian fancy, was enormously popular during the war, and that it's a poor historian who visits the preoccupations of his or her own times on the past. But I stray from Evelyn, one of the least sentimental artists I know.)

The threat of invasion and violation has passed, the doors are open to their fullest extent, and what has been temporarily housed and sheltered inside, grain, maybe for re-sowing in spring in several weeks' time, and straw, with its own promise of enrichment for the future, is being processed and disseminated. And by women.

Further reading...